My experience with racism is embarrassing, because I was the perpetrator.
I was about eight years old. Just a kid growing up in the Midwest in the early 1970s. My dad had invited a Black man and his family to dinner at our home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He served with this man in Vietnam, and that’s all I know. This gentleman came to our house with his wife and two girls.
Today, I wonder what was going through his mind. That was a risky venture for sure. White people so often blow past all of the sensitivities, focused instead on our own heroic role.
But I didn’t think any of those things at the age of eight.
What’s emblazoned in my memory is dessert. We served pink ice cream with teaspoons. I remember sitting outside in a fold-up lawn chair, watching Black girls eat pink ice cream with teaspoons.
Something welled up inside me, a knotty, fearsome thing. It spoke no words and betrayed no facial expressions. But I can tell you the result. For years—many years—I would not eat with those teaspoons. If I was handed one, I substituted another type of spoon or ate with a fork. I looked at those teaspoons in the silverware drawer, and I would not touch them.
I never said a word to anyone. I was a silent perpetrator.
Let me stop for a moment and tell you a little about my family. My parents were church-going, evangelical Christians, but they weren’t the status quo variety. They believed the Vietnam War was unjust, even though my dad ended up serving there as a medical doctor. I can recall my mom towing me to anti-war demonstrations at the University of Michigan.
She also talked to me about racial justice, though she wouldn’t have used that term. I was vaguely aware that Black people weren’t treated right in this country. Because we had no proximity—no meaningful peer relationships with African-Americans—it didn’t go deep.
The teaspoon incident has been a source of shame for me. I cringe when I think about it. And please don’t conclude this is my only experience as the silent perpetrator. There are more.
My point is that this thing is so deep. Racism has soaked into the soil of this nation. It is pervasive and ugly and demonic. It stains and ensnares souls, even a little girl’s soul.
Little girls grow into big ones who say we’re fine, I’m not a racist, there’s no such thing as systemic racism, and when can we just move on? Racism has historical, social, theological, and spiritual roots. We are where we are in the evangelical Church today—at the breaking point, starkly along racial lines—because we have ignored the spiritual root. The demonic root.
Not long ago I told a group of people about the teaspoon. I weighed the risks first; I didn’t want to cause distress for the people of color in the room, and I hadn’t heard another white person talk about things like this. Yet I sensed the Holy Spirit urging me to speak.
So I did, prefacing with how embarrassed I was.
What happened astonished me. Other people opened up with experiences like mine. There were many silent perpetrators in the room.
Like I said, this racism thing is so deep, so pervasive. It will stay buried in that soil forever unless we expose it to the light of Jesus Christ—in our own lives first.
By the way, that is called repentance in my old Pentecostal circles. And it isn’t some tidy, check-the-box thing. Or a one-time prayer over the handful of folks milling around the altar.
Beware of repentance without tears. Many churches would rather issue a statement about racism, or invite one carefully vetted Black speaker to reference it from afar, or drop a dump-truck load of theological verbiage on you, than get messy at the altar like the old folks did.
Meanwhile, those silent perpetrators sit unruffled in their cushioned seats.
While our nation burns.
